[He stares out into the middle distance, silently.]

This is not my life.

This is not my life.

This is NOT my life.

The thought ran over and over in my head to the point of madness as I heard my own voice repeat someone else's vows, as I signed my own name to someone else's papers, as I dragged a coffee spoon through tea and cakes and ices, hardly ingesting a bite, watching my orphaned niece wander like a dazed, little ghost around the room, confused as I—a flower girl in black. Catherine looked more ravaged than ravishing: she had the same gown she'd worn only months before trimmed in black crepe; she had lost so much weight that it hung off her loosely and had to be awkwardly cinched by a belt with an ebony buckle—as though it were someone else's dress. I have no idea what I was wearing, but it choked me like a noose.

It was deemed improper that we embark on any sort of honeymoon, though I have no recollection of who had raised this objection. Perhaps it was one of my sisters; perhaps it was Catherine herself; or perhaps it was one of her sisters who had correctly gauged my former-sister-in-law's state of mind as she prepared to marry me.

Nevertheless, we did spend the weekend in an old inn somewhere not too far from Mount Vernon. As I recall, the place looked exactly like the county courthouse and was directly across the street from one. One of the two mornings I spent there, I momentarily forgot where I was and thought I might be passing through for a court case; the other morning, a local guide showed us some paltry local waterfalls and I thought how much better off the whole lot of us Hastingses and McCords would be if only I could have drowned myself therein and somehow swapped places with Joe.

The nights I spent in that inn...both of them...I have tried as hard since to forget as Catherine tried those two nights to forget I was in the room with her. Much in accordance with her stance on a proper honeymoon, Catherine felt it would be improper to engage in, as she put it, "marital relations" at such a trying time.

Looking back, I wish I would have asked why the hell she wanted to marry me in the first place, but—of course—I know now as I knew then that was not the point of the marriage and, the simple fact was, she never wished to have had the need to marry me at all.

However, on our wedding night, such a line of questioning was unthinkable, not simply because it would have been "improper" (here, a handy euphemism for everything "proper" for happy newlyweds) but also because, quite frankly, I was terrified. I was terrified firstly because Catherine was and always will be Joe's wife to me; but I was terrified all the more so because Catherine obviously had engaged in, to borrow her term, "marital relations" already—I had never.

As I pulled back the covers to get into bed beside my former sister-in-law, she at once was convulsed in horrid, wracking sobs. She turned away from me almost with violence, whereupon I went to touch her arm, perhaps to hold it—whatever my intentions were, I certainly had not thought them out past that. Catherine jumped as though I had electrocuted her and suddenly absconded from the bed. She moved as though I might try and seduce her in the state she was in, as though I had any experience in seduction at all! (The things women will assume!)

Little Catherine McCord, the prim neighbor I had known my entire life, my eldest sister-in-law's youngest sister with whom I had danced at her wedding to Joe, regarded me as though I were a rapist.

Now standing, still crying, she held me in her sights with wide-eyed alarm; I returned the expression.